1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a memory management apparatus, method, and system and, more particularly, a memory management apparatus, method, and system for continuous memory allocation to a device in a computer system.
This application of the present invention is the results of researches supported and carried out under a research project “Smart TV 2.0 Software Platform” (Government Project Unique Number No. 10041244) of SW Computing Industry Original Technology Development Project supervised by Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology (KEIT) under the Ministry of Knowledge Economy (MKE).
2. Discussion of the Related Art
In a system in which physically contiguous memory is only reserved, but is not used, memory is wasted. In general, devices that require physically contiguous memory are not always used, but they have an idle time. Reserved memory is wasted as a share of the idle time is increased.
In a recent related prior art, the allocation of reserved memory to data that can be migrated in an Operation System (OS) is permitted. This technology, however, requires a long time that is taken for a reserved region to be used by a device if a dirty page and a virtual memory page are present in a reserved memory region. This is because a unit time taken to move data included in each page is great. If such a time is increased, there is a problem in that the time taken to drive an application (e.g., a camera or a video playback program) dependent on a device is increased.